We have a WRT160NL router with OpenWRT 10.03, and a 60-70 Mbit connection (from ISP, don't ask why). This router can do 30-35 Mbit on ethernet(i mean cable)..ok!

There are ~7 PC's using this Wireless router, 6 through wifi (wep, because of the speed.. :\ ), 1 with cable.

Question: How can we limit P2P/torrent traffic, to have very-very-very-very low priority? I mean if someone downloads from torrent, the speed is getting about e.g.: ~0,5 Mbit/sec etc.

Without recompliing (i only want to use "stock" packages) are there any chances that i can do this? how?

max connection limiting? how?

topology:
ISP -> WRT160NL -> 7 clients (NAT, 192.168.1.0/24)..

I don't want to completely "disable" P2P/torrent traffic, I just want to slow them down, so the network would be usable even if several people use it, and e.g.: one of them is downloading st. over torrent. But if only e.g.: 1 person is using the network, then allow him to use all the bandwidth without limiting P2P.

2 Answers
2

I agree with Caleb that splitting the bandwidth is probably going to be the easiest, however, as a more roundabout solution, you might want to take a look at Micro Transport Protocol. uTP has been designed by the uTorrent guys to try and mitigate latency issues caused by BitTorrent which I assume is the root of your issue. In my experience it works quite well and there's a noticeable difference on my ADSL connection, for example.

In the free software ecosystem, uTP is supported by KTorrent (4.0+) and Transmission (2.30+). Vuze also implements it, but not on Linux. And, of course, the official uTorrent client supports it.

I suspect your best-performance scenario is not going to be doing deep packet inspection to detect P2P traffic but just fair queues so that the bandwidth is split between the number of active. The CPU overhead of inspecting for P2P traffic would probably burn off any gain you got out of specifically slowing it down.